Welcome to TapBeats!

TapBeats is a music game for Android designed to be accessible to blind and low-vision users.

With the video game industry placing an increased emphasis on graphics, the visual spects of games are becoming more and more important, so that blind and low-vision people are often excluded from video game play.

To address this gap, we created an accessible and mobile casual game based on audio cues. Through TapBeats, we hope that the blind and low-vision population will have more opportunities to enjoy the benefits of casual gaming.

How to Play

The core of TapBeats is what we called the gameplay screen. The gameplay screen has four equally sized buttons, one in each corner of the screen. Each button makes a different drum sound. The player uses this screen to play drum sounds in order to play TapBeats.

There are two major gameplay modes in TapBeats -- Career Mode and Quick Play Mode.

In Career Mode, the player follows the story of a drummer whose dream is to become a rock star. There are a number of preset stages the player must pass in order to finish the story. The first few stages are designed to help the player get used to the game mechanics and introduce them to the various ways TapBeats can be played.

In Quick Play Mode, rather than having to work through the story, the player can pick directly between the different types of gameplay TapBeats offers. The different gameplay modes are: Free Play (where the player can play instruments freely), Memory Mode (a game of Simon), Concert Mode (a game of Simon set to the beat of a song), and Studio Mode (play instruments freely along with a song).